Well I guess it just depends...

...on who you listen to and how much truth you attach to their statements.

Bin Laden's beef has always been very simple....there are US troops "in the holy land". The "holy land" in reference is Saudi. He declared a jihad against us because we didn't leave after the Gulf War.

bluke pointed out the accuracy of the list put before us of "questionable" diplomatic decisions over the course of years. And, there is and can be no satisfaction to some...as our actions are questioned...our lack of action would also be questioned. Damned in both directions. Because there is a certain element that can never be satisfied.

And I'm sorry that you, too, (surprisingly) seem to be missing the tacit assumption of complicity that those lists imply. Sure they don't imply the scale of the atrocity...but had it only been 15 soldiers aboard a boat...they probably wouldn't be so quick to back away from that position. Instead its 6500 (and rising) innocent civilians.

I cannot accept even a hint of that complicity.

And that especially - the nature of what "he says" is his beef - underscores the utter inappropriateness of the acts of 9/11. It was the act of no-longer humans in the throes of ultimate Religious-insanity: My Idea IS Right = supersedes all other persons' ideas and their lives too.

We / No One "deserved" this insanity. To imagine so, is to become a mechanical part of a computer game, a non-human being.

As we have become militarily invincible, so have we become less and less sensitive to the many in the world who simply - do not want to live as Muricans live, embrace their 'values' (farmily or other), subordinate all of life to: mercantile machinations 24/7. In that sense, how could we *not* hear-fron the many many less-powerful, whose lives are daily affected by our powerful worldwide actions and yes - manipulations ?? But in attention-getting manner, not in doomsday scenarios for all who want a more-open society, free as possible from theological zealotry of all the infinite stripes.

And finally it IS about - The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper and others). I agree with those who ID this atrocity on that scale. Underlying it all is the fact too, of how much easier is destruction of a complex (organism?) than its creation - symbolized by the ~7 years to construct the towers, an hour to doom them - seconds! for their compression into dust + thousands of ordinary human beings. I believe this is the 'scale', order of magnitude of what has been launched.

No existing 'slogans' can capture the opened Pandora's box, or accurately describe the nature of the quality of all decisions that must be made, next and for the foreseeable. 9/11 ended one era. (The one of "luck" from the infinite possible destructive mechanisms?)

Good luck to us all then. And.. restraint. *Nobody* 'knows' how to deal with matters on such a scale as this.

Ashton

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